On the face of it this is a shortish,
even lightweight, programme, but that's without reckoning for late
Celibidache. Just looking at some fairly "traditional" alternatives
on my shelves, I see that a combination of Cluytens, Monteux
and Silvestri would have shaved more than half-an-hour off
the timing here. However, it is useless comparing Celibidache with
anyone but himself. The phenomenon is isolated and unrepeatable
and music-lovers should make up their own minds whether it hooks
them or not.

It is very clear at the beginning that Celibidache at around 82
was still totally in command. He has to be helped to the rostrum,
where he takes
his place on a high stool, his features have filled out since the Dracula-like
aesthete who can be seen dancing around in RAI films from the 1960s, his body
no longer retains its eel-like wriggle when a dance motion is set up - though
a faint trace of this remains. Yet the gestures are still clear
and detailed,
interspersed with avuncular smiles of encouragement and the odd grimace. "Alborada" and "Prélude" can be ranked with the best Celibidache in the sense
that I found my body-clock adjusting to his own timescale and in a sense not
noticing the slow tempi - typical "normal" timings for these two pieces would
be around 07:30 and 09:30. I maybe thought towards the end that this was a
rather stylized, art nouveau faun, but that is not
something inherent in the tempi themselves.

Possibly it is a mistake to listen to so much
music interpreted in this way at one fell swoop. Maybe if I had
heard the "Rhapsodie" first, rather than the other two pieces, my
disbelief would have been suspended as it was initially. As it
was, I began to feel that Celibidache was slipping into
self-parody in the middle movements, though the final part had
plenty of colour and vitality. "Traditional" performances of the
"Rhapsodie" do not usually exceed 15 minutes.

And then, while middle-aged listeners may tire, elderly conductors
may do so too. I got the idea that his gestures in the second part were just
that little bit more generalized, that he was following the music rather than
leading it. This is something difficult to quantify with performances that have
been so extensively rehearsed that all he really needed to do was just to sit
there to ensure that all went basically as planned. However, it is notable that
he adds a couple of minutes to his "Ibéria" of only a couple of years earlier
- see
review - and during the last section
the tempo gets gradually slower. This suggests that he was at the
beginning of the slippery slope towards those late Klemperer
performances that weren't really conducted at all.

Even
if you resist the idea that he was not getting the results that
ideally existed within his mind, the fact remains that the central
section is woefully slow and, to my ears at least, the logical
connection between the phrases is lost. Aside from the fact that
a "normal" performance of "Ibéria" takes about 20 minutes,
Celibidache himself took 23:41 in Milan on 24 April 1969 and 22:50
in the context of a complete performance of the three "Images" in
Turin on 17 October of the same year. I suggest that the real
Celibidache - a mature artist in his mid-fifties - is to be found
there.

We know from Ravel's own recording, as well
as the famous argument in which Toscanini told him he didn't
understand his own music, that he liked "Boléro" slow. This
performance might have cured him. It was fascinating at first in
its Zen-like stillness, the long, curling tune manicured in every
sinuous detail. But how it went on. On 15 May 1955 in Turin,
Celibidache himself took 15:09, which is pretty normal.
"Orchestration without music" - Ravel's own description - is bad
enough without dragging philosophy into the equation. On the other
hand, Ravel meant the piece to irritate and it certainly did that.
I normally stay the course for at least half the way but
Celibidache had me thinking just how often we had the wretched
tune through even before the dynamic level starts to rise. Then,
as it got louder and louder, this performance more than any other
had me thinking "oh God, not again" as each new repetition
started. So perhaps Ravel would have been pleased.

In
view of the fact that DVDs tend to get into more non-specialist
hands than CDs, I think it was irresponsible of Christoph
Schlüren, in his accompanying essay, to present Celibidache as a
selfless interpreter of the composers he conducted - "he realized
just how counterproductive it is to impose one's own personality
and its baggage of ideas between the musical context and its
acoustical realization" … "Celibidache, in every instant, allowed
his musicians to immerse themselves in the worlds of Debussy and
Ravel" … "Probably no one has ever performed these works with
comparable perfection". Anyone exploring classical music for the
first time should be duly warned that Celibidache represents an
extreme case of the cult of the conductor and the mystique of the
interpreter and his performances should not be approached by
listeners who are not already well versed in how the music
"normally" sounds. Students of the Celibidache phenomenon, as I
have suggested, will find at least the first two items of the
programme fully up to their highest expectations.

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